The Weekly Screed (#612)

‘Goodbye, Mister Douchebag’
By David Benjamin

“I wish to God she had an M4 in her office locked up — so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands. But she takes him out, takes his head off, before he can kill those precious kids.”

— Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.)

BROOKLYN — When I heard him on Fox News, Louie Gohmert’s touchingly wistful image of Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung strapped with an ammo belt, wrapped in Kevlar body armor and leveling a gas-operated, magazine-fed, selective fire, shoulder-fired Remington M4 carbine at baby-killer Adam Lanza, I felt a wave of bitter nostalgia.

This is because I, too, feel wistful about guns in education. Long ago, before America even dared ponder the sensible notion of arming its schoolmarms to the teeth, I was a teaching intern at a frontier high school in darkest Rock County.

As part of my basic training for a teaching degree, my college dispatched me to Edgerton High. My mission was to edify, if possible — in English lit and poetry appreciation — more than a hundred adolescent sodbusters who’d been torn from the soil, toil and manure of their hayseed upbringing. The apotheosis of my internship appeared in my first-period junior English class. He was called Mike.

Mike was not a “precious kid,” nor had he ever been one. Occupying the first desk in the middle row, Mike didn’t so much sit as sprawl, like a pool of noxious effluent oozing from a train wreck — forcing me to repeatedly step over each of his legs if I wished to range the floor between my desk and my alleged pupils.

Large, hairy and unkempt, Mike exuded the sullen menace of an abused Rottweiler. He was always chewing something. I never determined what it was, although he regularly spat some of it — a glutinous substance, medium brown with yellowish lumps — onto the floor between my desk and my alleged pupils.

Although not strictly illiterate, Mike confined his reading and writing to the obscenities he misspelled on the blackboard. Taciturn among his classmates, he turned loquacious — with an audible sneer — whenever I took the floor to attempt teaching. As I spoke, Mike rumbled along in a surly undertone punctuated by juicy snorts, mocking my manhood and belittling my wherewithal.

Mike’s affectionate nickname for me — adopted by most of the class — was “Douchebag.” This cloud’s silver lining only appeared months later when — possibly moved by my perseverance — he started to call me “Mister Douchebag.”

Besides ruining every class, Mike ignored assignments, eschewed homework, crumpled quizzes, trashed tests and sniggered at the “F” I gave him (later turned officially into a “D” because of Edgerton High’s compassionate “no-fail” policy).

 For all his obnoxiousness, Mike was — among his fellow clods — a popular guy. For boys, he was a role model. For girls, he was alluringly dangerous. His contempt was infectious. If he’d been in Sidney Poitier’s class in To Sir, With Love, there would have been no gradual thaw between Poitier and pupils, no pedagogic epiphany, no etiquette lessons, no field trip, no rock ‘n’ roll. No movie.

Well, there could be a movie. But mine would be really different. For instance, in the first scene (better yet, during the credits), I’d be issued a firearm — not Gohmert’s ostentatious M4, which would be impractical for classroom combat. (Too long, too heavy and, although only .223-caliber, the muzzle velocity could result in bullets going right through one kid and snuffing the next one over.)

Now, jump to the middle of the movie: Mike’s depredations have driven me to the end of my patience. As the last straw, he refuses to read the part of Benvolio in Act 1, Scene 4 of Romeo & Juliet. I say, “C’mon, Mike, it’s a small part. Just read the lines. Please?” Mike replies, “Bleep bleep my bleepin’ bleep, Douchebag.”

Here, I snap. Grinding my teeth, I slip behind my desk and unlock the drawer. I remove my government-sanctioned ultra-lite .22-caliber Taurus revolver. A lovely gun. I step toward Mike and suddenly, the barrel is jammed between Mike’s upper and lower plates, pointed straight at his naked uvula.

I give Mike a chance to back down. I say, “Go ahead, punk. Make my day.” Happily for me, slobbering with bravado, Mike makes my day. He says, “Uk you, ‘ouche’ag,” which is the best he can manage with a gun barrel in his mouth.

OK, pause the DVR. I’m not going to depict, even fictionally, another school shooting so soon after the Newtown massacre. Cut to: Waves crashing on the shore. On the soundtrack, the Boston Symphony plays a John Williams crescendo.

Next scene, three days later: Mike’s mother is calling the school, wondering why the kid isn’t at home setting fire to the cat, or raping his little sister, as usual.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I tell her. “But I took my School Board-issued revolver and greased your degenerate son in first-period English. He had it coming.”

“Oh, really? Hmm.” After a moment of reflective silence, she says, “Well, I’m sure you had your reasons, hon. God knows we did. How much do we owe you?

“It’s on the house, ma’am. What would you like us to do with… the remains?”

“Well, I don’t know. The school has a furnace, doesn’t it?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then, I’m sure that’ll be fine. Just shove him in.”

My murder trial is an anticlimax. I get a local jury and, after testimony by Mike’s parents, dozens of his classmates and the grateful faculty, plus guest cameos by Wayne LaPierre and O.J. Simpson, I’m not merely acquitted. I get a standing ovation.

And a new job, teaching counterinsurgent poetry at West Point.